Social Media

5 Useful Tools to Track Twitter Unfollowers

It can be hard not to take it personally, but being unfollowed on Twitter is as much a part of the microblogging service as direct messages and trending topics.

We can't make losing followers less tough, but we can help you track who stops reading your tweets, and potentially figure out why they hit the road.

From services that alert you when someone clicks the unfollow button, to a timeline of tweets that enhances your ability to figure out where you went wrong, here are five options that can help you analyze when and why people unfollow you on Twitter.

Let us know which tools you are using to track Twitter unfollowers in the comments below.

Other than trawling through your followers list, or hitting up individual accounts to see if you can DM someone, there's not really an easy way on Twitter to see if someone is following you.

Solutions to this problem come through various web services, one of which is "Friend or Follow." It's quick, easy to use, and will show you at a glance who you are following and who has not reciprocated by following you back.

Simply enter your Twitter username and you'll be presented with the thumbnails of those who don't follow you. You can hover over the pic to see the bio for each Twitterer and there's the handy option to remove "Verified" accounts from the list, presumably as these are less likely to follow you back.

You can sort the list by name, username, location, follower stats, etc., and you can also choose to tweet about it, although we'd imagine that not many people go for that option.

Friend or Follow will also provide you with a list of those who follow you that you don't follow back, and a list of "friends" — Tweeters who you follow that follow you, too.

Similar to Qwitter, but offering instant (rather than just daily) e-mail notifications, an RSS feed, and a web-based summary, TwUnfollow is our unfollower notification service of choice.

To start receiving e-mail alerts when you are unfollowed, head over to the site, sign in via OAuth, enter your e-mail address, verify it and get your settings sorted as to how and when you want to get alerts.

Once you're all set up, TwUnfollow will alert you to the tragic event with an e-mail stating that "these twitterers aren't following you any longer," followed by a clickable list of usernames and a link to your online follow/unfollow history.

In our experience, the service isn't quite "instant," but the alert e-mails generally come through around half an hour after the unfollowings take place, so it's not far off.

TwitterCounter can't help you identify your leavers, but it can offer stats and data on your followers in order for you to see the bigger picture as far as your Twitter presence and following goes.

Sign in to the service and it will show you, on a line graph, how your follower numbers look for a weekly, monthly, or three-month period. You can also plot the same info against how many tweets you've sent, see data on whether your current followers are up or down compared to your average, and even compare your Twitter account with up to two others.

It seems the TwitterCounter team has also invested in a crystal ball, as the site offers "predictions" (presumably based on past activity) of how your account will grow over time. For example, for the account we tested, we were informed that in 37 days it would hit 1,600 followers.

Wider services offered by the site include a "profile checker" that dispenses advice on your profile page, and various widgets and buttons, such as this one:

The Goodbye, Buddy! service "busts" unfollowers by sending you a direct message to alert you of their abandonment, making it a handy in-Twitter alternative to TwUnfollow.

Best of all, the DMs are humorous (examples include "I just saw @username leave — do you wanna ask them why? Only if you give a tiny rat's ass, of course") which kind of takes the sting out of knowing there's someone out there who is no longer interested in your 140-character musings.

In addition to the DM alerts (which take a while to kick in — we're still waiting for our first DM four days after signing up) you can also log in to the service on the web to see a history of your unfollowers. There are even more features if you're willing to cough up some cold, hard cash.

TweetEffect can potentially help you pin down where you're going wrong in terms of tweets that are turning off your followers.

Simply enter your Twitter username into the site and it will bring up your last 200 tweets and note next to them at which point you gained followers (highlighted in green), lost followers (in red), or stayed static.

Rather interestingly, for the account we tested, it appears that most followers were lost when the tweets were replies to others, or parts of insider conversations, suggesting that tweeple get bored of effectively being CCed into a conversation stream they are not directly involved in.

Although not 100% accurate, TweetEffect is a great tool to consult if your Twitter account is suffering from major churn.

In Conclusion

Twitter, although incredibly useful and increasingly influential in the online world, is just a social network, and it's not a gauge for success — or even popularity — in real life.

However, if monitoring Twitter unfollowers and trying to work out the reasons they left is important to you, then we hope these tools will be of good service. Please have your say in the comments below and let us know any other services you find useful.

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